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Quotes by Artist

"You had to make an appointment to see her. But it was just a crazy spectacle, people filing past."

"What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art."


"Close friends are truly life's treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone."

"And then, of course, most potters, they go in for earth tones and subdued things, and I like color."

"While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate."

"That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches. Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us. Hold property and external riches with fear; they often leave their possessor scorned and mocked at for having lost them."

"I don't think artists are made, I think they're born."

"You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice."

"The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open."

"Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural."


"Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller."

"Immortality is really desirable, I guess. In terms of images, anyway."

"Half of me is very excited and the other half is 'Haven't we seen this stuff before?' But I'm very impressed. I almost couldn't picture it when it was being put together. I couldn't picture it being in my hand, what it would look like."

"Alan was always interested in politics in a major way. He actually believes that anarchy is a politically viable system, but I don't. I was always interested in putting forward the ideas that represented my viewpoint. I feel the same about anything I'm doing."


"What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation."

"If the technical innovations of the Impressionists led merely to a more accurate representation of nature, it was perhaps of not much value in enlarging their powers of expression."


"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"

"I drew a picture on the back of a calendar in pencil. In those days they used to give out free calendars, I had no art paper, so I took whatever else I could."
Art,

"I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities."

"Color is a very critical thing. I've found that architects don't like colors. Engineers too. And so somebody has to stand in. Because this is the finish of it. It is the emotional part of a structure. I had great satisfaction in doing that."


"Color is a plastic means of creating intervals... color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony."


"Some people use just one condom, right? But we use tons."

"Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of your heart."


"I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings."

"Not only that, but when I first met Joe, to my intense delight, he showed me that he was a collector. He was collecting some of the early Tarzan pages by Hal Foster, and, later, early Flash Gordons; and I found that we were both absolutely interested in the same type of thing."

"I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist."
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